Introduction to the Music

This section focuses on English folk-song tunes, their characteristics, methods of study and history. It tackles the question of why English folk song sounds the way that it does. As A. L. Lloyd wrote in the original Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1959), ‘None of this need frighten the reader who has no mind for musical technicalities.’ Such technicalities are explained here as clearly and straightforwardly as possible with examples drawn from the present volume. Nevertheless, nothing can take the place of actually listening to traditional singing. Some recordings from the last 110 years are commercially available and can be located through the Folk Song Index mentioned in the General Introduction.

Despite the interest in folk-song melodies of the Edwardian collectors and others, there are in general fewer studies of the music of folk songs than of their words. Indeed, some of the earlier published folk-song collections, such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and John Bell’s Rhymes of the Northern Bards (1812), contained only the words. Literary scholars like Francis J. Child (1825–96) were similarly concerned with ballads as poetic texts rather than songs and left the consideration of the tunes out of their accounts. Fortunately, from John Broadwood’s Old English Songs (1847) onwards, folk-song collecting was frequently undertaken by musically trained individuals and their methods set the pattern. Few of the major collections published post-Broadwood omitted the tunes, with the exception of Alfred Williams’s Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames (1923).

When collecting from a living tradition of folk singing became the vogue, the ability to document the tunes rested on the collector not only being musically literate but having the skill to take down tunes by what was effectively oral dictation. This was no mean feat when he or she was noting down the words as well, and some employed an assistant for that very reason. Others used the sound-recording technology of their time. At the dawn of the twentieth century, this was the phonograph, which recorded up to two minutes of sound on to wax cylinders. It was not commonly employed by collectors during this period, however, except Percy Grainger. By the time of the Second Revival after the Second World War, technology had improved in fidelity, portability and ease of operation, and the use of audio-recording equipment became the norm in folksong collecting.

Prior to this, though, the favoured method was the notation of tunes by ear directly from the performances of singers. As a result, much of the tune evidence dating from Victorian and Edwardian times takes the form of a skeletal notation (excluding details of singing style such as ornamentation) of a single stanza of music. This may represent the first stanza of the song or a ‘normal’ form of the melody as it developed during the performance and was apprehended by the collector. Without sound recordings of these singers we have no independent check as to the accuracy of the transcription in relation to what was sung or how typical the normal form of the melody was in terms of both rhythm and pitches. Judgements as to the reliability of tune transcriptions have then to be made on the basis of what we know about the musical skills of the collector in question and their experience of, and attitude towards, folk song.

Even with the more widespread use of electronic sound recording, transcription was still not a straightforward matter. Its ability to allow repeated playback and the slowing down of renditions led to some highly detailed notations by Grainger, which others found very difficult to follow, and some, like Cecil Sharp, felt exaggerated aspects of the singer’s performance style (see ‘Bonny Bunch of Roses O’ (No. 2), for an example, albeit simplified, of a Grainger transcription). As Charles Seeger has pointed out, it is important to consider the purpose of the transcription and to reflect that in the level of detail adopted. He distinguished between ‘prescriptive music-writing’, which acts as a blueprint for performance, and ‘descriptive music-writing’, which takes place after the performance and attempts to describe what happened in it. Since a major reason for the transcription of later sound recordings of folk song has been so that new audiences could learn and sing them, the notations have needed to function as prescriptive music and have thus remained single-stanza, skeletal transcriptions. Some do note variations in pitches and rhythm occurring from one stanza to another, though, as Sharp also tried to do.

Singing Style

Although music notations can give us pitches and rhythms, they cannot convey the way the singing sounded. What we know about performance style is almost entirely based on evidence from the late nineteenth century on, in literary accounts (such as Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford (1939–43), mentioned in the General Introduction), collectors’ descriptions of singing as they witnessed it in the collecting situation, the home and the pub, and on sound recordings.

It is important to bear in mind that traditional singers had no formal musical training. This is not to say that they were not accomplished musicians or that there was no learning process or practice involved, but rather to emphasize that the techniques and conventions of art and popular music are not of relevance here. Many were not musically literate and, even if they were, this skill seems to have been little used in this context, where tunes were generally learnt from listening to others’ song performances. Words and music would be taken in as a conjoined unit, therefore. Sharp went so far as to claim that singers could not remember the words of songs if they could not remember the tune. This may have been true for some singers but has not been universally found. What Sharp’s observation does highlight, though, is the vital importance of the tune as the means by which the words are both expressed and recalled in an oral song tradition. Songs were rarely ‘taught’ as such, except perhaps to children, meaning that they were usually learnt from repeated listening to complete performances (not necessarily always by the same singer), or re-created from a single hearing by recall of the melody, the storyline and some of the specific lines of the song’s text. The manner in which songs were performed was taken in as part of the same process of watching and listening and was not taught separately.

A key feature of traditional singing in England is that it has been widely found to be solo in style (except where the audience joins in with a chorus), and does not use any accompanying instruments. There are exceptions to this, the Copper family of Rottingdean in Sussex who sing in harmony being an important one, and it has been suggested that unaccompanied singing is a relatively recent phenomenon (Gammon (1981)). Two examples of part-singing have been included here: ‘The White Cockade’ (No. 20) and ‘The Hungry Fox’ (No. 110).

In the solo performance tradition, the manner in which singers perform a song can vary according to their identity, ability, the context and function of performance (including the amount of alcohol they have drunk) and the kind of song being sung. By and large, the overriding focus of singers is on putting across the words of the song clearly. Too many histrionics, changes in tempo, articulation and dynamics are felt to detract from this and so are avoided, although there is often more leeway in a comic song. Hence English traditional singing has often been described as ‘plain’ or matter-of-fact, even impassive, and this is reinforced by the predominantly syllabic setting of the words to the music (discussed below).

Sharp commented that the traditional singer ‘is a past-master in the art of welding together words and tune, i.e., in enunciating his syllables with great clearness, while maintaining an unbroken stream of melody’ (English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (1907), p. 107). This highlights a subtle but crucial difference between the singing style of traditional and trained singers. Trained singers are basically taught to prolong the vowel sounds of words in order to sustain the notes. Traditional singers, on the other hand, tend to keep the length of vowels closer to speech and do a greater amount of singing on voiced and hummed consonants. This can sometimes lead to the creation of an extra syllable, the word ‘plough’, for example, becoming ‘pl-ough’. When the consonant cannot be voiced, a momentary staccato-like effect is produced. This method of vocalization contributes to the buoyancy and lilt of much English traditional singing.

Musical Characteristics of Folk Song

Form, Rhythm and Metre

English folk songs, in common with those from elsewhere in northern and western Europe, are frequently made up of two- or four-line stanzas of text matched by a four-phrase melody. The melody and stanzaic form are repeated while the words that fill them are changed in order to recount a story or evoke a scene and its attendant mood. The repetition of the melody makes it familiar and predictable, even mesmerizing, to the listener as the rendition progresses. It also means that when someone else learns the song the melody is usually the first element to be picked up and in turn helps in remembering the words.

Sometimes stanzas are lengthened by the repetition of one or more lines in the manner of a chorus, or refrain (as in ‘Bold Grenadier’, No. 77, for example), or they may have new lines which recur at the end of each stanza (as in ‘Bonny Light Horseman’, No. 41, and ‘The Cunning Cobbler’, No. 78). Refrain lines are also found interpolated as lines 2 and 4 of the verse, in which case they are technically known as a burden (see ‘The Cruel Mother’, No. 116).

The words of each line commonly consist of four stresses with a varying number of unstressed syllables in between. Many songs are in ‘ballad metre’, which at first sight seems to be a four-stress line followed by a three-stress one, although in reality the melody to which they are sung contains a pause or held note at the end of the three-stress lines, implying a fourth stress. Ballad metre is often accompanied by a rhyme scheme of abcb, which may become abcbb when the final line is repeated (as in ‘Barbara Allen’, No. 40). When the song has a burden, however, lines 1 and 3 carry the rhyme abac (as in ‘The Frog and the Mouse’, No. 108). Another common verse pattern consists of four lines with four explicit stresses. It is often found in broadside verse but is not confined to it (see ‘Golden Glove’, No. 26, and ‘Blackberry Fold’, No. 131, for example). More complex verse forms are also found.

The musical stanzas have been moulded to fit the length of the verse forms and the length of the lines within them. They thus typically consist of four phrases, each ending with a brief moment of repose though this can vary depending on the singer’s style of singing and whether or not the line has a masculine (stressed syllable) or feminine (unstressed syllable) ending (see, for example, ‘The Painful Plough’, No. 101, and ‘Spanish Ladies’, No. 19). There is generally a more pronounced pause midway through the stanza (at the end of the second line or phrase).

The form of folk tunes is commonly described in terms of their phrase structure, with letters denoting each phrase and indicating any recurrences of it. Common patterns range from ABCD in which no two phrases are alike, to AAAB, ABCA, ABAC and ABBA. Sometimes a phrase may be repeated in a slightly differing form, which is often denoted by the use of a straight apostrophe, for example, the common pattern ABB’A.

In terms of rhythm and metre there is also a close fit between the melody and the words, with the textual stresses usually coinciding with the musical metre. The number of unstressed syllables between each stressed beat can vary and this leads to rhythmic variation by the singer, who adds, repeats or omits notes accordingly. Most singers seem able to do this with ease, and this is an important skill given that in the English tradition the words are married up to the notes of the tune in a highly syllabic manner, that is, with one or two notes allotted to each syllable. At the opposite extreme is melismatic word-setting in which multiple notes coincide with a single syllable of the text, as found in Irish sean-nós singing, for example. A glimpse of this is found in ‘The Bold Princess Royal’ (No. 1) as sung by Ned Adams, but in general this kind of singing is rare in England.

The syllabic setting of the words to the music is highlighted by a relatively regular feeling of pulse underlying many singers’ renditions (sometimes described by tune commentators as tempo giusto style, drawing on the Italian performance direction meaning ‘in exact (that is, strict) time’). This does not always result in bars of regular length, singers often adding an extra beat to the bar at the end of the phrase, for example, but it does allow rhythms to be reasonably well represented by Western art-music notation. As anyone who has attempted to transcribe a song from a sound recording will know, however, some singers perform in a stricter style than others, and for several songs in the present collection it has been necessary to make the notation more complex in order to convey this subtle elasticity. This results in what Percy Grainger described as ‘a regrettably disturbing impression to the eye’ (Grainger (1908), p. 152).

It is also notable that syncopation, in which a stress is diverted to a beat that the listener is expecting to be unstressed, is not commonly found in English folk-song melodies. Upbeats (pick-up notes), on the other hand, are almost invariably the rule for each phrase.

The four-stress textual line tends to result in musical phrases which are notated as four bars in length. The number of beats in these bars is usually two, three or four, in either simple or compound time (in which the beats can be subdivided into two or three quicker notes respectively). Melodies either wholly or partially in five time are also found. Indeed, this metre seems to be associated with certain song examples, including ‘Bold Fisherman’ (No. 21), ‘Barbara Allen’ (No. 40) and ‘Basket of Eggs’ (No. 59) in the present volume. Five time produces asymmetrical bars, which in these examples always follows a 2+3 pattern.

Tonality and Range

Although the majority of English folk-song melodies draw on the notes in the major scale, their tonality has been something of a preoccupation among those who have collected and published them. Writing in 1833, for example, William Sandys noted that some folksong tunes do not conform to either the major or the two forms of the minor scale found in Western art-music theory. Instead, the scales of such tunes have frequently been described in terms of the ‘medieval’ or ‘church’ modes. References to the names of modes, such as Ionian, Dorian, Aeolian and Mixolydian, are commonly found in folk-song publications, and can appear arcane and off-putting to the non-music specialist. They are doubly confusing in that some commentators have chosen to treat the major scale as modal because another of the modes replicates the constituents of that scale under the name of the Ionian mode. Not surprisingly, some analysts have questioned the usefulness of the modes on various grounds. Nonetheless, they refer to a real aural characteristic of English folk song, and understanding modal terminology and the reasons for its use is important to the history of English folk-song collecting and publication.

What is a mode? It can be narrowly defined here as a type of scale, a scale being a sequence of notes abstracted from a piece or style of music and placed in ascending or descending order of pitch. In Western art music, scales consist of seven different notes, the eighth note being the same as the first note but at a higher or lower pitch. The difference between one pitch and another in a scale is described in terms of two basic intervals, the half step (semitone) and whole step (tone). Much popular and art music, though not world musics, that we hear today conforms to the major scale and/or the two forms (harmonic and melodic) of minor scale. These scales, and the tonal conception of music that they imply, became the norm in Western music in the seventeenth century and they have been with us ever since. The crucial difference between tunes cast in these scales and those cast in the modes was that the former implied certain harmonies or underlying chords as part of a simultaneous accompaniment, while the modes did not. This is because mode theory was developed to describe and account for plainsong, an unaccompanied chant used in church liturgy. The sixteenth-century theorist Glareanus presented a reformulation of the modes introducing what he maintained were two previously overlooked modes – the Aeolian and Ionian – and established the system of terminology, based on ancient Greek writings, that is used in discussions of folk song.

We can begin to appreciate the different sound of modal music compared to tonal harmonic music if we take a well-known tonal tune and ‘translate’ it into the various modes. Take, for example, the opening of the carol ‘The First Nowell’, which makes use of all the notes in the major scale:

‘The First Nowell’ (major)

The distribution of steps and half steps in the major scale, also sometimes referred to as the Ionian mode, is as follows:

Major-scale tones (T) and semitones (S) arrangement

If we alter the seventh note of the scale (C sharp) and make it a semitone lower (C natural), this modifies the tone-semitone pattern, turning it into the Mixolydian mode. When applied to ‘The First Nowell’, this produces an obvious difference in sound:

‘The First Nowell’ (Mixolydian)

If we then retain this modification and additionally lower the third degree of the scale (F sharp) by a half step (F natural) we arrive at the Dorian mode, again with obvious aural results:

‘The First Nowell’ (Dorian)

Finally, if we retain both of the above modifications and lower the sixth degree (making B into B flat), we create the Aeolian mode:

‘The First Nowell’ (Aeolian)

There are other modes, but these are the three, or four if the Ionian is counted, that are noted as prevalent in English folk-song tunes.

Although the example just given is highly artificial (‘The First Nowell’ was conceived as a tonal tune, implying a certain harmonic accompaniment, not as a non-harmonic, modal melody), we can at least gain some idea of the impression that the apparently modal folk tunes made on nineteenth-century musicians. At best they sounded ‘quaint’ and at worst ‘wrong’ or ‘out of tune’, and they presented obvious problems when folk songs were set to a piano accompaniment. Champions of folk song around the mid nineteenth century nevertheless began to make a virtue of them, the attribution of ‘modal’ lending the melodies greater validity at the same time as tending to lead to claims of their consequently being ‘ancient’. Towards the end of the century, in the years leading up to the formation of the Folk-Song Society, the modality of English folk tunes was made increasingly explicit by collectors who again, under the influence of an evolutionary perspective on music, and a Tylorian theory of survivals, believed modality to be evidence of a tune’s antiquity.

The aesthetic appeal of modal folk-song tunes came to the fore in the early twentieth century in the writings of collectors such as Lucy Broadwood, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp. Sharp at first appears to have equated modality with the ancientness of a tune but he quickly changed tack, insisting that the modes were ‘no test of age’ in folk song. He countered the idea that modal folk tunes may have become part of country singers’ repertoire from church music, implying as this did a process of cultural ‘descent’, and instead suggested that folk singers had probably always used the modes. He also began to stress the freshness of modal folk tunes and their potential for the modern composer.

That modes came to be so prized among Sharp and his contemporaries is very much due to the musical climate of their time. English composers in the late nineteenth century had been striving to overcome a 200-year-old tradition of musical impotence and were trying to develop a distinctively national musical style by which to counter the late Romantic idiom then dominant in most of Europe and emanating largely from Germany. It was partly through their contact with folk-song melodies that certain English composers, such as Vaughan Williams, were propelled towards the final realization that the modes could form a viable point of departure for the new musical idiom they sought to create. This idiom had connotations of ‘Englishness’ by virtue of being found in folk-song melodies collected in the English countryside, and had the musical potential to furnish an alternative to the lush chromaticism of much contemporary music from the Continent.

While Sharp insisted that each mode had its own individual character, which in turn affected the character of a folk song, Grainger, who had made a detailed study of songs he had collected using the phonograph, emphasized the tendency of singers to alter the third and seventh degrees of the scale, and occasionally the sixth, in their performances by up to a semitone. These are the very degrees which differentiate the different modes from each other and from the major scale. Thus, Grainger proposed that modal songs were cast in ‘one single loosely-knit modal folk-song scale’ that combined Mixolydian, Dorian and Aeolian characteristics (Grainger (1908), p. 158). This model was not received favourably by members of the Folk-Song Society and was not widely taken up, and modal terminology persisted throughout the twentieth century.

Modal terminology was most notably employed by Bertrand Bronson in his ‘mode star’, which was intended to demonstrate the points of overlap between the modes and also between pentatonic and hexatonic tunes (drawing on a five- and six-note scale respectively). Norman Cazden, another American folk-song scholar, was an outspoken critic of modal terminology in folk-tune analysis and attacked Bronson’s mode star in particular.

It is almost impossible for us to escape the major and minor tonality to which we have been conditioned when we listen to the melodies of folk song. There is also little evidence as to how singers themselves ‘heard’ modal tunes and even if they were aware of them, how they might have articulated their qualities. Singers were likewise not isolated from standard major and minor tonality, which permeated church music and commercial forms and would have been reinforced by the tuning of certain musical instruments. Rather, it seems that the flexible tuning of certain notes may arise at least partly from their position in relation to other notes of a phrase and their association with certain formulaic melodic patterns that can be found in folk-song tunes.

We are on firmer ground when we consider the note range of tunes commonly used for folk songs. In England, this is usually no greater than the interval of an eleventh, that is, one and a half octaves. Tunes can be divided into two categories according to where the ‘tonal centre’ – often the final note of the tune – lies in relation to the other notes. In tunes with a so-called ‘authentic’ range, the tonal centre lies at the extremes of the range, with the rest of the notes used in the tune being located in between. By contrast, in tunes with a plagal range the tonal centre lies more or less halfway between the lowest notes of the tune and the highest ones.

Authentic range

Plagal range

Stability and Change in Folk-Song Melodies

One consequence of the unwritten nature of English folk-song tradition was that the melodies associated with the songs were not fixed. There was usually no original version to which performers had access and could refer, and sheet music and latterly even commercial recordings, when used as sources, might be regarded as starting points rather than models that must be precisely imitated. Performers also varied as to how much they aspired to sing songs in the way that they heard them sung and how much they liked to innovate, consciously or unconsciously.

Changes could occur in one or more elements of the tune, such as pitches, tonality, rhythm, speed, metre and structure. Some of these could be introduced in the course of a song as the singer fitted the tune to the differing number of syllables of the words, for example, or if the number of textual stresses varied from the norm. Variation in one element could also lead to variation in another, a change in the order of the phrases, for example, sometimes necessitating adjustments to individual pitches. These changes have been regarded as the result of either creative or degenerative processes (individual artistry versus forgetting, for example) but there is a sense in which all change requires creativity, whatever the impetus for it in the first place.

Given the scope for altering a song’s melody, then, it may come as something of a surprise to the uninitiated to learn that many of the tunes noted from English folk singers sound markedly similar to each other. This was constantly noted by folk-song collectors, not only in England but also in Scotland and Ireland, who commented not on how many tunes they encountered but, conversely, how few. The same basic tunes cropped up over and over again but in slightly differing forms, or ‘variants’ as they called them. The existence of these flexible and variable melodies raised many questions. What makes one tune variant sound ‘the same’ as another? Where is the dividing line between one tune, in all its variant forms, and another? Are all variants descended from one original tune? Why are some variants from geographically distant places very similar and others from the same location very different? Is close resemblance between variants evidence of their genetic connection?

Folk-song scholars have come up with the concepts of ‘melodic contour’ and of ‘tune families’ to help tackle these kinds of questions. The outline of the melody, or its contour, has been observed to be one of the most stable elements of a tune. At the most general level, many tunes in Anglo-American, Scandinavian and German folk-song traditions are essentially arc-shaped in that their first phrase is confined to the lower part of the melodic range and the phrases in between rise to one or two melodic peaks before descending to the same level as the initial phrase. At a more specific level, though, it has been hard to pinpoint the exact combinations of elements that make one melody strike the listener as ‘the same’ as another, and it is quite possible that shifting criteria come into play in different cases. This difficulty has hampered the classification and comparative study of folk-song tunes, which, despite digital technology and developments in music information retrieval, still relies principally on the human ear and a wide-ranging knowledge of traditional tunes.

The American scholar Samuel Bayard made an extensive study of Anglo-American folk-song tunes and their resemblances. He identified a number of what he called ‘tune families’. These were groups of related variants that he presumed had descended from a single original melody and taken on multiple forms due to variation, imitation and assimilation. In total, Bayard identified more than forty tune families among the folk songs of England, Ireland and Lowland Scotland and their descendants in the New World. The crossings and overlap between these areas show that a pure English tradition of folk music is a myth and the assertion of a tune as, for example, ‘English’ or ‘Irish’ in origin or character belies the complex history of melodic relationships and interchange between England and other countries.

Bayard’s tune families also highlight another feature of folk-song tunes. Despite the close relationship of music and words in oral tradition, singers were clearly able to separate the two when needed to fit the tune to a different set of words, such as those taken from a broad-sheet. The recycling of melodies in this way was commonplace and explains why there are fewer tunes than songs. Intriguingly, when one studies the tunes associated with particular songs, as Bronson did with each of the Child ballads, for example, and as has been done with some of the songs in this volume, it seems that some songs have been strongly associated with just one tune, while others are associated with many distinct melodies. It is tempting to interpret the former situation as indicative of the vitality of a song in oral tradition through time and space, and the latter situation as being related to the influence of print in perpetuating or reviving a song that has lost vitality in oral tradition. Alas, it is difficult, if not impossible, to substantiate these speculations.

Tune History

While it is likely that the majority of folk-song melodies originated in a single composition by an individual composer, these compositions have generally not been preserved. In addition, it was not only traditional singers who recycled melodies. Trained musicians and professional composers have likewise drawn on folk-song melodies, making arrangements of them and recasting them in their own works. When it appears that we have found the origin of a song in such a source, then, it can turn out that the composer was ‘borrowing’ from oral tradition in this way. On the other hand, there are instances of composed pieces from other performance traditions, such as the eighteenth-century glee club, and music hall, parlour ballads and blackface minstrelsy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, being adopted by traditional singers and becoming widespread through oral transmission and, more recently, electronic media such as radio and gramophone records.

Where these sources exist they provide some of the scant datable evidence we have relating to melodies sung by traditional singers. They also provide glimpses of the complex ways in which, during specific eras, songs and tunes were appropriated and re-appropriated by performers in different spheres of professionalized and non-professionalized music-making and among performers and audiences of different social classes.

Despite tonalities that resembled the modes of pre-harmonic music, and the fact that Bronson and others have found melodic resemblances between some examples of plainchant and folk songs (see the headnote to ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’, Child 4, in his Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, I (1959), p. 39), few of the tunes noted from oral tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be shown to have originated in or date back to medieval music. The earliest evidence for many English folk-song tunes is the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries although, of course, they may be older. Some occur in the sets of variations written on popular tunes by Renaissance composers such as William Byrd (My Ladye Nevell’s Book, 1591) and the contributors to the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Others were published in Thomas Ravenscroft’s collections Pammelia, Deuteromelia (both of 1609) and Melismata (1611). In the second half of the seventeenth century, folk-song tunes crop up in the enormously popular and much reprinted publication by John Playford, The English Dancing Master (1651–1728). In the eighteenth century, two major sources of evidence stand out. One is Wit and Mirth; or, Pills to Purge Melancholy, first published in 1699–1700 but, again, much reprinted in expanded editions and latterly edited by Thomas D’Urfey, himself a composer of stage songs set to ballad tunes. The other is The Beggar’s Opera (1728), by John Gay, a highly successful work which spawned many imitations. The work was satirical in intention, with Gay substituting the arias that characterized contemporary operas with short songs set to well-known tunes of his day. Music performed in pleasure gardens also entered the repertoires of folk singers and was itself influenced by songs in oral tradition. By the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, songs from minstrel shows, parlour ballads, evangelical hymns and music-hall songs (often comic) were often adopted into folk singer’s repertoires as well, as noted above.

Despite this, the historical record for a great many English folksong tunes remains patchy and still more sources may yet come to light or become accessible through indexing and digitization. For this reason the definitive history of most folk tunes has yet to be written, although two major contributions are to be found in Bronson’s Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (1959–72) and Simpson’s British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (1966). Rather more haphazard are the notes that folk-song collectors provided on tunes in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society.

Julia Bishop